The invention relates to a text processing system comprising a pagewise text display based on character representability. The system also includes text processing and text storage sub-systems and a user interface featuring a set of text manipulating actions activatable through mechanical user actuation of an appropriate input devise. Various professional and personal computer systems have text processing systems. An exemplary reference is the xe2x80x9cCommon User Access Advanced Interface Design Guidexe2x80x9d for the IBM Operating System/2, by IBM, June 1989, Document SY0328-300-R00-1089, pages 33-42. Text is represented as characters according to one or more of the following formats, free-formatable, connected or non-connected. Manipulating actions have been designed in a wide variety as will be described hereinafter. In this way the formatting of the text can be effected at many levels include character, word, line, block, window, paragraph, page or other, while various actions such as insert, delete, cut, clip, paste and others are useful. In the effecting of those actions, the multilevel structure of representation of the text has been found useful. The most commonly used input devices based on such mechanical user actuation are hard keyboard and mouse. However, various other devices such as track ball, touch screen, or writing stylus can be used.
It is an object of the invention to support representation of other communication media and their processing by means of an interface that to an appreciable extent is uniform among various media. The invention realizes this object by representing such media as a text metaphore in that the display has an audio display mode on line-wise pseudo character representation. The audio display mode features at least a first subset of the set of text manipulating actions which operate on displayed audio in a similar way as on displayed text. Each of the latter actions has a mapped effect on the actual stored audio corresponding to the displayed pseudo characters. The time sequence of audio governs the progression of its display along successive lines. For easy accessibility the audio signal is represented as pseudo-characters such as tiny blocks with the height dependent on audio intensity. In particular, space characters function as delimiters between contiguous audio segments that are separated by a pause. Such a pause can be detected as occurring in the audio input, such as the end of a word or sentence. In an alternative realization, any pause character is a default item in that selectively, audio may be input into selective positions, i.e. time instants, such as in filling in a form or questionnaire with audio answers. In this way, audio is indeed processed as a text metaphore. The correspondence among the various actuations makes life easier for any experienced user. On the other hand, the mapping of various manipulating actions on various input devices need not be uniform among text and audio. And even for a single object, certain manipulations may be restricted to a particular input device as differing from other manipulations and/or another object.
Advantageously the audio is voice at a linewise display scale that is comparable to text display, and comprising delimiters as signalizations of detected silence instants. The duration of a word or line of text would then correspond in display space to the display of that many characters in textual representation. Their correspondence in physical space would be readily visible to a user. The silence delimiters correspond to ends of words or sentences in written text.
Advantageously the display has a fax display mode based on a linewise representation of the fax. The fax mode features at least a second subset of the set of text manipulating actions operating on a displayed fax area in a similar way as on displayed text. Fax is defined as text represented by a bit map, wherein the character/word content or format may be uncertain in any degree, and wherein in principle, any two-dimensional format is allowable. It has been found that composing in a fax page would be advantageous as well, such as transmitting text together with non-textual material, supplementing a received fax with typewritten text, moving parts of a facsimile page with respect to other parts, and many others. The subsets of actions relating to audio and fax pages, respectively, may be, but need not be identical. The difference between text and fax information, is that the system does not know the meaning of the fax information. Even with a character recognition feature, only an approximate knowledge exists.
Advantageously, the system has user controlled skew correcting means for correcting the skew of a particular line of fax. Word select is possible if the skew is small over the word length, which is usually the case. Line select is possible if the skew over the line length is small compared to the line height. If this is not the case, the operator may manually correct the skew users, in-processor algorithms that are rather elementary. These algorithms have been described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,618,991 and 4,759,076. Editing in the sense of the present invention has been described by these references, however.
Advantageously, the system has orientation detection capability for detecting a local orientation of a displayed fax text line for allowing word and/or line select by the actions along a detected line. Whereas the earlier approach works if the adjustment required is not too great (say, up to some 20xc2x0) and is more or less uniform over a page, problems can occur if the skew is very large (up to 90xc2x0) and/or is severely non-uniform over a page, such as would occur in handwriting. In that case, the orientation of the line is detected, such as has been described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,723,297, which may, in principle, be done separately for each line. The detection may be followed by correction, if feasible, or the editing may be executed directly on the slanting uncorrected line.
Various advantageous aspects are recited in dependent claims.